The
US Department of Energy's(DOE)
National Renewable Energy Laboratory(NREL) announced today that its wind turbine design codes, termed
FAST and, can now be used for worldwide turbine certification.
Through a joint effort by the NREL and Germanischer Lloyd (GL) of
Although many
The FAST code (for Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence) is a comprehensive aeroelastic simulator capable of predicting both the extreme and fatigue loads of two- and three-bladed horizontal-axis wind turbines.
ADAMS (Automatic Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems), developed by MSC Software, is a general-purpose, multibody-dynamics code with unlimited degrees of freedom that also is used to model robots, satellites, and cars.
To gain acceptance of the codes, NREL and GL ran a comparison between FAST,
The project started with simple comparisons and grew in complexity as the participants gained confidence that all the codes were using the same properties for the models. Results of the comparison will be published in an NREL technical paper and presented by Marshall Buhl, a senior engineer at NREL, at the 2006 American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Wind Energy Symposium in
In its report, GL stated that the comparison showed good agreement between the codes. GL granted NREL a certificate for FAST and
stating that the codes can be considered suitable programs for the calculation of onshore wind turbine loads for design and certification.
Five ways to prepare for your first day
If I may add my own personal Tip No. 6 it goes something like this: From time to time a more senior member of staff will start explaining something...